Museum avoids glib parallel between Obama, FDR

Sworn in as president in the midst of a deep economic crisis, Franklin D. Roosevelt turned his first 100 days into a swirl of action as he sought to right the sinking ship of state.

At first glance the analogy between Roosevelt in 1933 and President-elect Barack Obama in 2009 seems almost too good to be true.

But a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, titled "A New President Takes Command: FDR's First Hundred Days," avoids obvious and overly simplified comparisons between the early stages of the New Deal and the expectations surrounding the new administration.

Associated PressPresident-elect Barack Obama

Exhibit curator Stephen Edidin says the numerous comparisons between the two presidents taking office, one during the Great Depression, the other in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, are very complex.

"When it first came up in the press, people tried to make it a direct parallel, but Obama himself said that's not really the case," he said. Obama, in fact, has said he wants to be judged on his first 1,000 days, not first 100.

The exhibit consists of items selected from the permanent collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, located up the Hudson River from Manhattan in Hyde Park, N.Y. Last spring, that museum launched its own FDR exhibition, titled "Action, and Action Now: FDR's First 100 Days."

Edidin notes that the most famous line in Roosevelt's inaugural speech, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," did not draw applause at the time. "The one that did was, 'Action, action now,'" he said.

This theme is illustrated by a political cartoon showing a heroic FDR at the throttle of a smoke-belching locomotive labeled "U.S. Recovery - New Deal Special," as Uncle Sam stands trackside cheering him on.

File photoFormer President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Other cartoons also portray him as a man of action -- chopping down a tree labeled "Do Nothing Policy"; walking a tightrope above Niagara Falls with the headline, "Hazardous -- But it Must Be Done"; and as a lumberjack breaking up a logjam of issues such as "National Defense," "Petty Politics" and "Beer Problem." The latter, Edidin said, refers to an FDR initiative to legalize low-alcohol content beer, a precursor to the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933.

The drawings of Roosevelt at the time offer no hint that as a polio victim he could not walk and was able to stand only with the help of heavy steel leg braces, a handicap that amazingly remained semisecret through his four terms as president.

A set of the braces is included in the exhibit, which fills just a single wall case -- perhaps appropriate for a display covering less than 3 percent of Roosevelt's 3,692 days in the White House, most of them filled with tumult.

The most interesting items include original typewritten pages of Roosevelt's famous fireside chats, informal radio speeches about the nation's problems and what he intended to do about them. The pages, with handwritten marginal notes, are the ones from which FDR actually spoke to millions, the first president to use radio the way modern politicians use television.

"They felt they were making an immediate connection with the populace ... even though the chats were totally scripted, the same way the photography was," Edidin said.

Largely in response to the fireside chats, the White House began receiving 50,000 letters a week, 10 times what Roosevelt's predecessor, Republican Herbert Hoover, had received.

A New Yorker magazine cover dated March 4, 1933 -- Inauguration Day -- depicts an ebullient Roosevelt seated in a limousine next to a dour-faced Hoover, whose own attempts to cope with the collapsing economy had largely failed.

According to Edidin, that cover, drawn weeks earlier by famed cartoonist Peter Arno, was never published. "The editors pulled it because they didn't think it was serious enough," he said.

But eerily juxtaposed with it in the exhibit is a photograph of the pair actually leaving the White House for the inauguration on March 4 -- seated in an open car as if posing for the unused cover.

The exhibit at the New-York Historical Society runs through May 3. "Action, and Action Now: FDR's First 100 Days" can be seen at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., through fall 2009.